Teaching Labor’s Story

NIKKI MANDELL recently took early retirement from the History Department at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater and is now working as an independent scholar in Portland, Oregon. Her research and publications have centered on early twentieth-century American labor, business, and women’s history. She is currently developing an oral history project related to employee-owned businesses.

First, a little background. In 2013, in response to a call for web-accessible teaching materials and the intensified assault on public sector workers, the LAWCHA board authorized an ad hoc committee to “develop initiatives that would assist and defend public school teachers around the country and assemble curriculum resources that would help teachers more effectively tell labor’s story.”1 Under Randi Storch and Rosemary Feurer’s leadership, the Teacher/Public Sector Initiative committee’s work quickly bore fruit. The first phase of that work is a teacher/public sector worker toolkit hosted at LAWCHA’s website. If you haven’t explored (and used) these resources, now is a great time to do so. In addition to Rosemary Feurer’s extensive Labor History Links bibliography, the Labor History for the Classroom and the Public page provides links to essays,...